Gordon Dickson Childe 10 Other

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to be replaced later on by another flash, and a little later another ...
But, even in this state, his dreams were meaningless. He moved about worlds,
he looked at stars, he spoke to people but there was no sensible reason to its
parts. Any one dream bit was unconnected with those before it.
At last these gave way to what might be real dreams; in the sense that he knew
what was happening from a dream-ing standpoint, even if they followed a
natural dream-like, reasonless pattern. Most of these were forgettable he went
places, he saw things, but they added up to nothing in particular. Then
finally he came to his first full, coher-ent dream.
It came at a time when the dreams, interspersed by the periods of talking,
began suddenly to be interrupted by what must certainly be blackouts; which
for some reason gave him a growing inner certainty that he was stronger,
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gaining the upper hand at last over what had made crazi-ness out of everything
he seemed to be seeing, feeling and thinking.
He was a sandstorm. He had been at some earlier time a large cyclonic
windstorm over water, over a large body of inland water. Now he had moved over
land and weakened; but in weakening he had picked up hot sand from the stretch
of desert sand that bordered the body of water here. Now it was a wall of
sand, and he was carrying it forward, the heat of the sand replenishing the
chemical engine of his atmospheric structure that powered him.
He gained power. He picked up more sand and became a mighty sandstorm. Then
darkness came and once more he weakened; but he had not died completely when
the sun rose again; and again his strength revived with the day and grew even
greater. So he continued, growing and
moving, broadening and widening over a larger expanse of land away from the
water.
He was conscious of something in him like a mindless but all-consuming hunger
to conquer. The land was before him. He would cover it, would own it, would
pick up its surface, grind it and cover it with grains of the ground-up
surface. He went on and on until mountains loomed before him; and a terrible
rage was born in him, as he found he could only climb a certain distance up
the mountainside. But he could not stop trying; and so the rage within him
grew and grew even as he became weaker and weaker only slightly at first but
then more so, as he began to burn out his strength against the mountains.
But he could not stop. He was not built to stop ...
... And there was a blackout.
He was back in the room with Toni.
"... Evolution. Adaptation end of evolution," he heard himself saying. "The
old form, too highly specialized to a specific environment, begins to die off
as that environment changes. A new form, better adapted to the changed
environment or, even better, an environment in a contin-ual state of change,
takes over. Prehistorically ..."
He was dreaming again.
He was new wolf. He was Band-father first-ranked male in a pack of early
modern Old Earth wolves Plan-Speak-Hunt People who were supplanting the older
evo-lutionary lupine form: the oldwolves, or dire wolves, as later Old World
archaeologists would call them.
In the shadow of the young maple trees and the thick brush of the hillside, he
looked down on the open floor of the valley below, at the open area a hundred
feet or so down, where the dire wolves were already through their forenoon
sleep, in preparation for the coming night of hunting. They slept, some who
were friendly lying close to each other, even making small clumps others
scattered singly about at a good distance from all other sleepers.
By the Band-father's right shoulder stood Next-brother,
the second-ranking male of this pack of newwolves, first among those not
Band-father, but who carried their tails straight as ranking members of the
Band. By his left shoulder stood Band-mother, the top-ranking female of the
newwolves; and mother, in fact, to many of the Band. None stood ahead of
Band-father.
Like him, those with him looked out on a black-and-white world; but the air
reaching their spread nostrils was rich with a multitude of
nose-tastes "scents" was too pale, too meager a word to capture the fullness
of a newwolf's world of smell.
Strong upon it was the wolfish taste of the oldwolves down below. They were
larger than the newwolves; their bones were heavier. They were able to hunt
large prey like the hairy mastodon. But future archaeologists, finding mud
casts of their brains inside their fossil skulls, would note that their brains
were smaller than those of the newwolves.
The eyes of Band-father and the others noted and read each tiny movement of
each other and the dire wolves be-low; and when Band-father turned to them at
last, he read by the flick of an ear, the smallest movement, the narrow-ing of
an eye those tiny signals from them, that the other newwolves understood and
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agreed.
It was decided. He turned, they all turned, and began to trot back to their
own packground.
Even as he dreamed, Bleys- the human Bleys was tell-ing Toni about it; Toni
and anyone else in the room. He could not help himself.
It was noon when they got back to the packground and the Band was gathered
together. Excitement was high. Band-father went back and forth among his
children, his brothers and sisters and their children, touching noses,
re-ceiving their signs of obedience gripping their noses in his jaws as some
Roman legate might grip the forearms of his soldiers in approval before a
battle. Gradually, the un-derstanding amongst them all grew, an understanding
that passed from one to the other, not in symbols, but simply
by a chain of smaller actions and gestures nose touching, nose bites, slight
movements, the whole language of the new people for they did not think in
symbols, but in im-ages of scent and sound and sight and emotion, all joined
in a patterned community of understanding that replaced what could not be said
in words.
This afternoon we hunt the oldwolves and drive them; as we hunt and drive the
meat-animals that are our prey in a two-pronged attack, by two part-Bands. I
will lead one part-Band. Next-brother will lead the other.
Then Bleys moved even deeper into the dream, no longer conscious of saying
aloud what he was experiencing to Toni or anyone else. Only, for a moment
before he was submerged ...
"I thought you ought to have a look at him," something in him was barely
conscious of Toni saying.
"Yes," Kaj said. "You were right...."
But Bleys went deeper, leaving them ... lost now com-pletely in the dream.
He was the newwolves' Band-father.
CHAPTER 39 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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